Business Objects Expands Product & Service Intelligence Analytic Application

Business Wire, July 30, 2002

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 30, 2002

Announces Two New Analytic Application Modules for Analyzing

and Optimizing Product Profitability and Increasing Sales

Business Objects (Nasdaq:BOBJ), the world's leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced the expansion of BusinessObjects(TM) Product & Service Intelligence, its analytic application that enables companies to analyze all aspects of product performance and promotions to increase market share, raise profitability, and optimize sales. Product & Service Intelligence is composed of a series of modules that help managers analyze product and channel performance, category growth, promotion impact, and pricing strategies.

The new modules announced today are BusinessObjects Product Performance Analytics and BusinessObjects Product Management Analytics. Product Performance Analytics enables organizations to optimize product ranges, improve brand performance, and maximize product profitability. Product Management Analytics helps companies manage pricing and promotion strategies and improve cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

Product Performance Analytics

Product Performance Analytics enables companies to determine the product categories that drive growth, the products with the greatest share of category, and the sales channel profitability changes over time. This enables users to learn which products should receive more investment and those that should be delisted, and reveals how product range and market share compare to the competition.

Product Performance Analytics is designed to help product, channel, and category managers identify top performing products by volume and profit, and determine what products are selling best in certain channels. This ensures continued investment in the most profitable products and channels.

Users can analyze product performance over the entire product lifecycle, balance the product mix in a category, and optimize space allocation to maximize product or group revenue. This enables them to track market share and sales history of a product from trial to maturity. In addition, users can identify the top performing brands and benchmark performance against target. This helps them easily identify the fast growing brands, classify brands by volume growth, and ensure sure sales are on track to meet revenue or volume objectives.

Product Management Analytics

Product Management Analytics helps organizations determine the products that rely on promotions to drive sales, analyze product revenue compared to launch date, see which products drive cross-sell opportunities, and understand price elasticity and basket composition.

Product Management Analytics is designed to help marketing, brand, and product managers track promotion performance and measure the impact of campaigns, enabling them to improve the success rate of product promotions. A user can discover which promotions have the most positive or detrimental impacts on revenue and determine the customer segments that prefer specific promotions, for example what groups respond to "buy one, get one free" promotions rather than discount coupons.

Users can optimize sales by analyzing customers' residual purchasing habits, product preferences, and brand/category interactions. For example, a user could learn what products his top customers tend to buy and which promotions drive sales of both the category and related products.

Users can create the most effective pricing strategies by measuring product price elasticity and benchmarking competitor pricing. With Product Management Analytics, a user could determine if sales were influenced by competitors' price fluctuations, or analyze changes in purchasing habits compared to price increases, for example, how a 5 percent price increase affects sales volume.

"At the end of the day, it's all about getting your products into the hands of consumers. Unfortunately, it is increasingly difficult for companies to maintain the lead over competitors, or to avoid self-competition with too many products and conflicting categories," said Gene Villeneuve, director of analytic applications product marketing at Business Objects. "Our expanded Product & Service Intelligence analytic application helps companies analyze critical product factors such as distribution channels, pricing, and promotions, which enables them to optimize market share and profitability and achieve competitive advantage."

Product & Service Intelligence is part of BusinessObjects Analytics, an integrated suite of enterprise analytic applications designed to enable business managers to understand their customers, products, suppliers, and partners, track key business indicators, and get more value from their corporate data. Analytic applications from Business Objects, including Product & Service Intelligence, offer the benefits of gaining an easy interface to all of a company's business analytics and a consistent BI strategy that leverages a company's existing resources.